4 Digital Marketing Trends To Look Out For In 2019

Christmas is in the air and 2018 is
drawing to a close, so it’s time to start looking ahead to the rapidly
approaching 2019.

Any online entrepreneur or ecommerce
business owner needs to nail their digital marketing tactics for the coming
year. It’s not only a matter of successfully generating leads and engagement
with customers and prospects, but also keeping up with rivals in a highly
competitive market.

Incorporating hyper relevant trends into
your marketing strategy will help your brand stay fresh and exciting to
consumers, and should hopefully result in some financial success too.

Below we take a closer look at four of the
digital marketing trends that are going to be big in 2019.

Voice search & interaction

We’re seeing a huge take-off in voice
search and interaction this year, and it’s only going to get bigger in 2019.

Smart speakers are becoming increasingly
popular with consumers across the world — think Amazon’s Alexa, Apple Homepod
and Google Home. Three of the biggest names in the digital industry have
brought out smart assistants in the last couple of years that can help out
around the house. Consumers can ask their smart assistants to do everything
from play Christmas hits to order last-minute presents on Amazon, to calling
friends, to dimming the lights.

Voice search is also on the rise — it’s
been predicted that by 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice search.
Consumers prefer the ease and speed at which questions are answered, so it
makes sense that more and more queries are performed through voice features
like Alexa and Siri.

Savvy brands will take advantage of the
marketing opportunities that voice search and interaction provide, and
incorporate this into their 2019 SEO strategy. This could be anything from
tweaking your meta-descriptions so that they read better when spoken aloud, to
creating FAQ sections or posts on your site that will come up in featured
snippets based on commonly-asked questions from your consumer base.

Live video

One digital marketing trend that is already
making waves in 2018 and will continue to do so next year is live video.

It’s the perfect antidote to rigid,
formulaic advertising campaigns. Consumers don’t want this anymore — they tend
to prefer informal, fun, and lively marketing styles. Live videos are raw and
unscripted, with elements of unpredictability and interaction. It’s this
feeling of ‘anything could happen’ that brings live video, well, alive.

Whether it’s using influencers in your live
videos (more on those later) or your marketing team (or yourself) answering
questions about the brand or demonstrating product tutorials, live video is
hugely successful with audiences, particularly with millennials and generation
Z.

AI & chatbots

The future rise in artificial intelligence
and chatbots isn’t as terrifyingly dystopian as you might initially think.

Many of the websites — particularly online
stores — that you visit on a daily basis will now have a chatbot ready to help
customers at the drop of a hat (or question). 2018 saw an explosion in chatbot
installations, and 2019 will see them becoming more commonplace.

If you want to keep up with your
competitors, it’s wise to invest in a chatbot to assist customers visiting your
store. If you’ve used or are planning on using an online store
builder like Shopify, there are various
chatbot apps available that are easy enough to integrate with your
ecommerce store. It means you can go that little bit further in the customer
experience, ensuring that you answer the need for instant gratification when it
comes to answers.

Chatbot technology has come a long way
since its beginnings, and chatbots now have a decent level of warmth and
personality that you’d be surprised with.

Influencers (in particular,
micro-influencers)

The last few years has seen a huge increase
in marketing through influencers.

Influencers are renowned for their
successful boosting of brand awareness, trust and engagement. They’re fun,
charismatic, and of course, they tend to have thousands or even millions of
followers — perfect for broadcasting your product’s perks to a huge audience.

2019 will see influencer marketing veering
from big-money, celebrity endorsements (the Biebers and Kardashians of this
world) to micro-influencers instead (for a fraction of the price).

A micro-influencer is an trusted voice in
their market, specialising in a particular topic, passion, or niche. They tend
to have between 1,000 and 10,000 followers. Unlike celebrity influencers, who
seem somewhat removed from ‘real life’, micro-influencers are just ‘normal
people’; albeit with a few more followers than you and I. That’s their main
draw, and the reason micro-influencer-based marketing is so successful: they’re
genuine, trustworthy and relatable.

Consumers are therefore more likely to
trust what they are saying — they’re not rich, glamorous celebrities being paid millions for a single
Instagram post. They’re just ordinary people who are experts in
their own niche. A recommendation from them seems much more organic and
authentic — as experts in a particular area, of course they’re going to have a favourite product or brand that
they use. Why wouldn’t they want to share this in-depth knowledge and genuine
love with their followers?

Micro-influencer marketing is essentially
just wholesome word-of-mouth marketing but on a much bigger scale. Jump on this
oncoming trend train by gathering a small team of micro-influencers to widen
your reach and shout about your brand.

When
people think about future trends and what we will likely be seeing in the
coming years, they tend to overshoot and predict weirdly futuristic
technological advances. Actually, what we’re seeing more of at the moment is
trends leaning more towards human interaction, with emphasis on emotion and
connections.

The
coming digital marketing trends that we’ve listed above reiterate this;
incorporate any of these into your marketing strategy and you’re one step
closer to making your customers happy and satisfied, which in turn will lead to
a thriving business.

PNDIGITAL

PNdigital is a leading digital services agency which specialises in maximising your Company’s SEO performance across the top search engines such as Google. Our passion and commitment to each client is at the heart of everything we do.